5 Aug 2015

PROMPT:  Apology

Rebecca Beegle, writer/storyteller

Cyrus, 62, paces.  Eugenia, 59, sits on the sofa.
CYRUS
My father will hate me.
EUGENIA
Your father is dead.
CYRUS
(to Eugenia pointedly)
My father would hate me.
EUGENIA
He’s been dead for twenty-five years.  You’re older now then he was when he died.
CYRUS
(angry)
Would you shut up!
EUGENIA
(realizing she was making a point that didn’t need to be made)
Sorry.
CYRUS
The war was the best time of his life.
EUGENIA
Didn’t he have three ships sunk out from under him, starting at Pearl Harbor?!
CYRUS
Yea!  It was still the best time of his life?
EUGENIA
Your family is weird.
CYRUS
We’ve been married thirty-five years and you’re just beginning to figure that out?
EUGENIA
I’m a slow learner.
Silence.
EUGENIA
He wouldn’t hate you.
CYRUS
He saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of his friends die horrible deaths.  He said it shortened the war by at least two years!
EUGENIA
That was his experience!  You have you’re own experience and you’re his son.  He would respect that!
CYRUS
You did not know my father.
EUGENIA
I think I only met him twice.
CYRUS
My father never respected me.  I was small and scared as a boy and I played soccer and hung out with girls.  He was a man’s man.  He smoked, he drank...
EUGENIA
Isn’t that what killed him?!
CYRUS
Yea.
Silence.
EUGENIA
What’s your experience?
CYRUS
I remember sitting in an elementary school classroom and the siren started blowing.  We all had to hide under our desks.  I had an imagine of tiny little planes flying in formation, dropping tiny black bombs, blowing up my house and my school... and me.  As a teenager, I didn’t think I’d live to be thirty.  I thought the world would go up in a ball of flame.  I remember working on an F4-E that the munitions experts were loading a live nuclear bomb on while a soldier with a gun guard us in a concrete bunker in Germany.  The plane had my name sprayed on the canopy opposite the captain’s.  We taxied it out.  It was just practice.  We were just practicing the end of the world.
EUGENIA
(going to Cyrus and comforting him)
That didn’t happen!  The world didn’t end.
Silence.
CYRUS
It could still happen.
Silence.
CYRUS
And seventy years ago today it did happen.
EUGENIA
The world didn’t end.
CYRUS
For more than a hundred thousand Japanese it did.  Most of them were women and children.  Poof.  Gone in the blink of an eye.
Silence.
CYRUS
I’m sorry I had anything to do with... with scaring a whole new generation of children.
EUGENIA
You had a young wife and a new baby girl.
CYRUS
I’m sorry this country decided to commit such a horrible atrocity.
Silence.
End of play.